David Luck

If he likes the direction of hitchhikers, I think 15 was when I read Iain M Banks's 'The Player of Games'. It's both a gate to 'hard' sci-fi and a terrific read.

(There is some tough stuff in there, but mostly off-screen from memory. I recall being fine with it, but may depend on tolerance)

Ah, the Magnificent Seven. Absolute horseshit, but brilliantly made horseshit that gets me every damn time.

The O'Donoghue book has references and... *shakes fist at sky*

The Wikipedia page mentions 'substantial conjecture' by O'Donoghue, which is perhaps weaker than my personal opinion. 😉

I'm not sure I understand your second point, but I've nothing against self-publishing. If I was a self-publishing author I would actually see this as a very bad thing indeed.

Yes, I did, and it's really worrying they had to actually issue that. Thankfully this book doesn't seem to have generated any references, but I feel this is coming...

Yes, this is a big point! Thank you Teresa.

And most importantly

3) I get asked a ton of questions about records that have never existed.

Just to quickly return to this, the implications of this are

1) by relying on out of copyright history, the errors of past historians get regurgitated (badly)

2) 'mid-tier', affordable histories by humans (yer Katherine Arnolds etc), which are at least fact checked, get squeezed out of the market

I hate to say it, but the cover is no better or worse than some of the popular histories I referenced earlier.

Ha, trust me lesson learnt!

You'd be most welcome! If the chance ever comes up do drop me a line directly- contact details are in my bio here.

I can see the logic, so is it a known phrase in American English? It's not one I've come across before, but happy to acknowledge my ignorance.

(looking at this a bit more closely, what the hell is 'census pressure'?!?)

(apologies, didn't use alt text on some passages, which are large chunks of text but they are available as samples via Amazon)

So... Yeah. Be careful out there folks. History writing just got a whole lot weirder, and finding good written history suddenly looks a whole lot harder.

(her books seem to be fantasy/romance too)

These books appear to only exist on Amazon. They don't come up on a Google search.

This 'Evelyn Cross' has no trace other than these Amazon listings. There is a self-publishing Evelyn Cross (who posts carefully bland engagement stuff on X), but she doesn't lay claim to these books.

Even weirder, the publication dates in Amazon have listed all her books as appearing in a matter of the last couple of months. I guess that could be self publishing playing some odd tricks?

But it looks like some sort of AI generated material. Mostly about horrific institutional abuses.

Now, the Bethlem book is bland. But her work on Willowbank is utterly anonymous. She could be talking about any institution here...

An Amazon listing showing the books 'Ed Gain: A Chronological Case Record', 'Jonestown: The Cult That Ended in Mass Death's; and 'After the Trains: Life, Death and Survival at Auschwitz'

Evelyn Cross has written a number of history books, all about institutional scandals. Here's a sample of some of her Amazon list...

So what's happened here? That's when I started looking a bit more closely at the author...

There's a lot wrong here. A lot. Part of the problem is that the first history by Geoffrey O'Donoghue has also got a lot wrong, and it's undoubtedly been LLM ingested.

But what records are they talking about here? Nothing exists pre 1557!

And the statues that were on the gateposts still survive. They're in the Museum! And they look nothing like this.

Anyway, no judgement on the history just for that.

And that's when I got to the sample...

And this came up as second on the list.

I'd never heard of it. That's fine. The Museum and Archives didn't ever meet half the authors of the other histories either. You can do a lot from home these days, and our records are on Find My Past.

The image grated a bit. It's not any version of Bethlem..

I found this on Amazon, while looking for a medium- sized history of Bethlem. There's one very good history (Andrews et al), which is a chonky 650 pages, and a couple of flawed-but-have-some-upside popular histories. I can never remember their name, so have to search every time.

Front cover of 'Bethlem Hospital: A History of Care and Control' by Evelyn Cross. The image shows a Victorian (?) institution viewed through open gates. Two statues stand on the gate posts

So, part of my job is to see what people are making of the history of our Hospital.

Bethlem partly exists in the gothic, horror-adjacent end of history, and so attracts a certain kind of presentation.

Restraints, gore, electrodes, I thought I'd seen it all. Until...

...I stumbled onto this book.

I think they've been quite pleasant this year. It's always a frustrating watch, as they don't have half the info that we do, but I found the faithful last year to be a chore to hang out with (quite apart from the weird emotional dynamics you mention).

I hate to say it, but it being only a half baked idea never stopped me!* Kate is quite right that giving it a bit of time to write it out will help decide it, if you can spare that time.

*('We wish it had!' screams the imaginary crowd in my head)

Hmm, I wonder if anyone has ever asked them about the Aylesbury tunnels?

Really great read about a relatively unknown source. It's great to see someone following in the footsteps of Bridget Howlett in explaining the Court!

(At least, I think this was one of her interests)